Church did not ‘weasel’ out of residential school settlement

Catholic Entities did what it could to fulfill agreement

The Catholic Register
(CCN)

A $21-million shortfall on a $25-million fundraising campaign was a fiasco, but it wasn’t an attempt to weasel out of the legal or moral obligations Catholics have in the wake of the residential schools tragedy, Grouard-McLennan Archbishop Gerard Pettipas told The Catholic Register.

The newspaper first reported the shortfall in January, but a Globe and Mail front-page report April 19 has led to accusations that the 50 Catholic organizations that were parties to the 2006 Indian Residential Schools Settlement Agreement used legal trickery to sidestep their obligations.

“It isn’t accurate,” said Archbishop Pettipas, who chairs the board of 50 Catholic Entities, party to the settlement, which agreed on three forms of payment: “There was a cash contribution. There was in-kind payment. There was a best-efforts campaign. We did all those. There wasn’t any weaseling out.”

As the final report of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission was pending last year the federal government said the Catholic Entities still owed part of the cash contribution form of payment: part of $29 million for healing programs that would be run by First Nations.

Their disagreement went to an arbitrator who found that Catholic Entities owed $1.2 million, which would conclude all the Catholic obligations for all three forms of payment under the Indian Residential Schools Settlement Agreement. The amount was paid.

A glaring scarcity of results in the “best-efforts” fundraising campaign has led some to question whether the Catholic Entities should have been released from their obligations.

Indigenous Affairs Minister Carolyn Bennett said the government would pressure the Church into restarting its fundraising.

“I think we want to explain to the Catholic Church that we’re serious about them honouring this obligation, and we will apply deeper pressure,” Bennett told The Globe and Mail.

The original 2006 agreement did not commit the Catholic Entities to anything more than “best efforts” in this one of the three forms of payment. Former Assembly of First Nations Chief Phil Fontaine, a residential school alumnus who chaired the Moving Forward Campaign for the Catholic Entities, believes best efforts were made to raise as much money as possible.

“We tried very hard to meet the commitment that the Catholic Church Entities faced. We were unsuccessful,” Fontaine told The Globe and Mail.

Ketchum Philanthropy senior vice president Joanne Villemaire told The Catholic Register the campaign they ran was “disappointing,” but that every effort was made against some very bad odds.

“This was a very tough project, a tough project going in,” Villemaire said.

Even before Ketchum took on the project, Catholic Entities was advised it would be tough. Ketchum is one of Canada’s largest fundraising organizations, whose client list includes every major hospital and university in the country and extends to organizing United Way appeals across Canada.

While the seven-year Moving Forward campaign did manage to raise money from Catholic dioceses, religious orders, and associations, neither wealthy individuals nor corporations were ready to step up and become lead donors, said Villemaire.

“A lot of people had given an indication that they would be at the table, but at the end of the day it was very low levels or it was not there,” she said.

Many people found it difficult to understand where the Indian Residential Schools fit into the complex history of the effects of colonization on aboriginals over the last four centuries. At least half of Catholics have arrived as immigrants over the last 50 years. Many have trouble seeing the 150-year history of residential schools as their fault.

“It’s not necessarily that Canadians are not supporting this. I think they’re probably saying this is a government issue and government should probably be supporting this. It’s a government responsibility,” said Villemaire.

“The Catholic Church and other religious entities have been brought into this because they were all part of delivering the services on behalf of government.”

Archbishop Pettipas explained that Ketchum and the Catholic Entities parted ways in 2013, “not because they were doing a bad job; they were doing a terrific job, but it wasn’t working. We were spending more money doing administration and promotion than we were taking in.

“On a $25-million campaign, you can expect to spend 10 per cent, or $2.5 million, on all that. But we had already spent $2 million and got almost nothing. So what do you do? Do you keep spending that kind of money and go broke yourself? What would you do?”

The Catholic Entities decided to launch a nationwide pew collection, but, a week before it was taken up, Typhoon Haiyan, one of the strongest tropical cyclones ever recorded, hit the Philippines.

“The needs or the plight of Canadian aboriginals sort of paled in comparison to the immediacy of that one,” said Archbishop Pettipas.

The final tally on the pew collection was just shy of $1 million.

As for the moral obligation of reconciliation, the Church is still there in remote aboriginal communities doing all that it can, said the archbishop. In fact, the Catholic Entities have over-fulfilled their obligation for in-kind services, the third form of payment under the Indian Residential Schools Settlement.

Where the court had ordered $25 million in services to be delivered between 2007 and 2017, the Catholic Entities had spent nearly $30 million on community-based projects and services by 2014, with three years still to go.

“I think reconciliation is about relationship,” Archbishop Pettipas said. “It’s about being able to meet one another. When I see what continues to happen in Canadian society around First Nations, I say we have a whole lot of reconciliation to do yet, because things are still happening.

“It isn’t that it stopped happening with the residential schools closing. There are things still happening, and we are seeing the effects: La Loche in Saskatchewan, and now we’re talking about Attiwapiskat again. Canadians have to be concerned about this as a Canadian problem.”